Summer has arrived in New York City, and there's no better way to spend it than lazing in the sun with a good book. It's time to head to the park and soak up some literature along with those rays. To help you start off your summer reading right, our staff and managers at Book Culture on Columbus have offered up their personal summer reading lists. We hope this provides you with some inspiration, and that your summer is filled with playful, contemplative, and ever surprising literary adventures.

As spring gives way to summer, the city is booming with life and a flurry of activity. The sun is out, the temperature is rising, and New Yorkers are finally emerging from their cocoons of down coats as shorts-and-sandals adorned butterflies. Okay, maybe that's a little much, but it is exciting to be able to head outdoors without several layers of fleece.

In honor of the change of season, I've put together a list of books that explore the wild, rugged outdoors that exists, even within the confines of the city. Go forth: Read! Explore! Have fun! Don't forget the sun block!

This Monday, June 15th, Jessamyn Hope (Safekeeping) and Jonathan Papernick (The Book of Stone) will read and discuss their recent novels. We'd like to thank Jessamyn for taking the time to answer our Q&A and for sharing her work with us!Jessamyn Hope grew up in Montreal and lived in Israel before moving to New York City. Her fiction and memoirs have appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Colorado Review, Descant, and PRISM international, among other literary magazines. She was the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee Writers' Conference and has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

In celebration of the publication of Elyssa Friedland's debut novel, Love and Miss Communication, we had the chance to ask her a few questions about the development of her first novel, her personal reading, and upcoming projects. We would also like to thank her for coming into Book Culture on Columbus for a book signing this past month! Her book is available in store or on our website.

Honor Moore’s most recent book is The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year and her most recent collection of poems, Red Shoes. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, The New Republic, Freeman’s and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah summer readings pick which is featured in the current documentary about American feminism, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.” She has been poet in residence at Wesleyan and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

This Sunday, April 19th, at 4pm, New Vessel Press will host an event featuring a discussion on the history and development of the press, including a showcase of current and future titles. New Vessel Presswas founded in New York City in 2012 and is an independent publishing house specializing in the translation of foreign literature into English.

Looking forward to this event, we interviewed cofounders Ross Ufberg and Michael Z. Wise about the press and upcoming publications...